10 years later, is The Hunger Games still shocking?

Ten years ago this fall, children’s author Suzanne Collins published The Hunger Games, a creepy, insidious story about a dystopian government that forces children to fight in a gladiatorial death match and broadcasts the whole thing on TV. And that book — and its two follow-up sequels, 2009’s Catching Fire and 2010’s Mockingjay — became a phenomenon.

The Hunger Games books were giant best-sellers, and the movie adaptations were blockbusters. Together, the two series kicked off the YA dystopian boom of the late 2000s. They became a pop culture shorthand for stories of inequality and scarcity. They created slogans that were used in actual protest movements. They helped launch Jennifer Lawrence to megastardom.

Ten years out from the Hunger Games phenomenon, it’s time to look back and reevaluate. To that end, Vox culture writers Constance Grady, Aja Romano, and Alex Abad-Santos joined managing editor Eleanor Barkhorn and critic at large Emily VanDerWerff to talk the whole thing through. Does this franchise live up to the hype? Is it actually good, or was it all talk? And at the end of the day, are we Team Peeta or Team Gale?

Constance: I still remember the exact moment The Hunger Games got me.

When I started reading the first book, I didn’t like it all that much. I thought the premise of children being forced to murder each other on a reality TV show sounded gross and trashy and exploitative, and I thought Suzanne Collins’s sentences were clunky and inelegant.

And because I didn’t respect the book, I was skimming as I read, so I missed all the telling details that deepened Katniss’s characterization in the first few pages, like the scene where she befriends a wildcat and you think she’s going to pick up an adorable animal companion, and instead she chases it away with stones because it’s scaring away the game. That passage tells us an enormous amount about the brutal pragmatism and unlikability that makes Katniss such a specific and unusual protagonist, and I skipped right over it the first time I read the book because I didn’t care to look for it.

Here’s what got me: Katniss had reached the Capitol and was going through her press interviews, and I was getting bored and thinking about maybe putting the book down. Then Peeta took the stage and gave his interview, and announced that he was in love with Katniss. “Oh,” I thought. “That’s a fun and tropey little love story. I’m a sucker for star-crossed lovers. This book is still trashy, but I’ll keep reading for a bit.”

Then I turned the page and realized that the love story was a tactic, that it was designed to make the audience within the book, watching the Hunger Games on TV, react exactly the same way that I, reading the book, reacted: to make them say, “Oh, how sweet,” and pay attention for a minute longer.

For me, this is the genius of The Hunger Games: It’s able to make me incredibly aware of my own emotional reactions to storytelling tropes, and then it creates enough distance that I can interrogate my reactions. Whom do I consider worthy of my attention? What violence truly hurts me, and what violence do I ignore? What makes a person’s death a tragedy? The Hunger Games creates exactly the state of mind I need to think those issues through.

And it always leaves me hyperaware that I’m not Katniss, not even close. I’m in the Capitol. I have to respect the guts of a book willing to make that fact so clear.

Does The Hunger Games work as a way of thinking through big questions for you, or does it still feel a little trashy or overwrought? And if it got you, how did it get you?

Aja: The moment that got me, or maybe the series of moments, was absolutely the way that Cinna, Katniss’s image consultant, weaponized her dresses throughout the start of the competition. I think for me — as someone who is really not typically into dystopia and high fantasy, because the language and codes of those stories often feel very removed from present-day reality — the localizing ideas in The Hunger Games really started to come through for me in those moments. They conveyed that this is a story about people consciously manipulating their public images and using fashion as a mode of survival in a society that has become entirely image-obsessed. It all felt very concrete, in ways that science fiction usually doesn’t for me.

This series definitely does feel, if not exactly trashy, then like a series whose carefully orchestrated ideas don’t ever quite come together fully or smoothly. I think one reason for that is that The Hunger Games is a YA series, so Collins also has to include a proverbial love triangle. I think another reason is that her action scenes and the plot by which we watch contestants fall to the Games can feel plodding and procedural, and far-fetched in the moments of climax.

But I also think there’s enough naturalism within the Battle Royale scenario that it balances out the robot birds and terrifying remote-controlled robot wolves. I think Collins took great care to make the Capitol especially feel like it could be any current city, rather than something very stylized and futuristic. And that impression of the city as this vapid but very real place, where the people who succeed have learned to manipulate its superficiality, has stuck with me ever since.

I also think Katniss is Collins’s greatest weapon: You really believe this girl is a determined strategist who can manipulate and bluff her way to victory in the final moments of the first book, and I think the faith she earns from readers in book one helps us navigate the many weaker moments in the rest of the series. Katniss keeps the whole thing grounded.

Alex: I think the clever genius of the trilogy is that it’s Battle Royale, but you actually care about the kids in it. Battle Royale did well to establish a dystopian future where adults control the youth through the annual Battle Royale. And while it’s a bloody concept and I was horrified when they died, I don’t think I really cared about or connected with the kids in Battle Royale the way I did with the kids in The Hunger Games.

That’s the genius of Collins: You get really invested in the characters to the point where you root for certain ones to live and root for certain ones to die. Like, Clove was a nasty piece of work, and I felt a dark relief and satisfaction when Thresh not only concussed her to death but did so to save Katniss and avenge Rue. Collins can also turn that feeling inside out and make you root for the charismatic Finnick or the damaged but loyal Johanna.

Collins taps into a kind of wish fulfillment — that you could imagine yourself winning the Games and be the exception. In reality, I would probably be most like Glimmer and die when Katniss drops a bunch of bees on my bitchy head. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking I could win it all, and somehow avoid the life of prostitution or drug abuse that awaits winners.

She makes the horrific concept of the Games alluring, which is the fantastic, insidious conceit when you realize that’s the entire point.

Eleanor: I am on record as being a bit of a Hunger Games hater. But as I was reading what Constance, Aja, and Alex wrote above, I started to question why. Katniss is a really compelling character! Collins does do a really nice job of not letting the reader off the hook! The series is a canny subversion of the love triangle trope!

And then I realized — what bugs me about The Hunger Games is not really the series itself; it’s the entire ponderous, reductive discourse it launched. For a while there, everyone had a theory on how The Hunger Games applied to post-recession America. Panem’s indulgent, out-of-touch Capitol was exactly like indulgent, out-of-touch Washington, DC! Also London. The nadir came when Dan from Gossip Girl called The Hunger Games a metaphor for Occupy Wall Street.

Even now, a decade later, the phrase “Hunger Games” is regularly used as a shorthand for any situation where there’s competition for resources. (Just this year: The Washington Post called DC’s school lottery “an academic Hunger Games,” CNN referred to Amazon’s HQ2 quest as “the Hunger Games,” and Stephen Colbert brought back his Julius Flickerman character to compare the revolving door of President Trump’s Cabinet to the Hunger Games.)

I know it’s not completely fair to judge a franchise for the way people talk about it. It’s like hating a band because its fans are annoying (and I love Dave Matthews Band — or at least “Crash Into Me”). But all the lazy takes have made me wonder if, in fact, The Hunger Games was also lazy — a simplistic critique of economic equality masquerading as something deep.

What do you think? Is The Hunger Games’ critique of contemporary media and capitalism useful? And what do we do when the conversation around a franchise becomes bigger than the franchise itself?

Emily: I think it’s interesting to note that The Hunger Games sort of accidentally gave us a way to talk about something people could feel intuitively but struggled to put into words — namely, a growing income gap between the haves and have-nots, and an ever-sharpening divide between cities and rural areas.

I don’t know how much of this Collins intended. After all, any good dystopia needs a significant gap between those who have power and money and those who do not. But these sorts of pop culture works go supernova, as The Hunger Games did for a brief time, because they find a way to express the things we’re worried about in our own world via the safe confines of storytelling. Or, put another way, it became easier to understand real life as an extension of The Hunger Games than it was to understand The Hunger Games as an extension of real life. (Famously, Collins conceived of the book when channel-flipping between Iraq War footage and reality shows.)

I suspect that the way the stories became conversational shorthand is due to how canny Collins is about the exact thing those conversations rarely touched on: television production. The Hunger Games is shot through with the knowledge of somebody who used to work in the TV industry, and Collins is always careful to ground the story Katniss is trying to sell within the larger stories and strategies that everybody around her is plugging away at. And it understands how pop culture is used to prop up all aspects of the social order, even the horrible, unjust ones. This is why, for me, the second book is the most frustrating: In its desire to plunge the characters back into the Hunger Games arena, it loses sight of these larger satirical devices.

But it’s also why I love Mockingjay best of the three books. (Yes. I know.) It’s a slog, but an intentional one, and as it rolls toward its preordained conclusion, Collins gets at something about how even the least predictable narrative twists and turns have a sort of glum inevitability to them. I don’t think it’s a particularly great book in the way the first one is, but it’s a book that tries so much more than you would ever expect. Collins is really, really good at having horror slide right by you in the middle of a sentence or two, a style that took a while to gel for me but that I eventually really got into. She’s probably not a strong enough prose stylist to make the final turns hit as hard as they could have, but that weakness weirdly ends up being an advantage.

However, it’s also impossible to talk about why The Hunger Games blew up without talking about a different woman who was important in its rise to fame: Jennifer Lawrence, the first genuine movie star minted in the 2010s and someone whose career has extended past this particular franchise. It might be my least favorite of the three books, but Catching Fire was a terrifically entertaining film, precisely for the reasons that it sort of dragged on the page. (In movie form, it almost seemed a snide critique of franchise filmmaking!) How do the movies compare to the books for all of you?

Aja: Before we jump to J-Law, I want to add one more thing about the real-life economics that surrounded The Hunger Games. I think it’s particularly fascinating that a book series whose resistance movement was so frequently compared to Occupy Wall Street spawned a movie franchise that yielded absolutely straight-faced marketing tie-ins that aligned so unironically with the brazen capitalism of the Capitol that they caused fan protests in response.

These included an entire “Capitol Couture” line of ready-to-wear fashion; a line of Cover Girl makeup that created a different “look” to accompany each of the starving and marginalized districts of Panem, including a special Capitol line; a pink archer’s bow Hasbro toy aimed at young girls, for those moments when you want to express your girlish charm while hunting wildlife to feed your starving family; and two food-related products: a partnership with Subway and upscale Hunger Games chocolate.

The level of bafflement these marketing campaigns produced, inviting queries about whether they were somehow being intentionally ironic (they weren’t), was exactly the portrait of bleak nihilism that made Mockingjay so devastatingly fitting as a series ending. (I know! But I agree with Emily!) They blithely, consciously missed the entire point of the series in a way the series itself anticipated — not to mention a way that also seems like the perfect presaging of the post-ironic, post-dystopian reality we have entered since.

And that constant sense of ironic self-awareness is also why the movie franchise works so well — better than the books, for me. Again, that starts with Katniss.

Before she was cast, I had seen and loved Lawrence for her devastating performance in Winter’s Bone, where she basically plays a proto-Katniss. So I was constantly marveling at the way the media completely ignored how perfectly this previous breakout role had positioned her to play Katniss, and instead dissected her ability to play the part solely based on her weight, her blondness, her attitude, her public persona. (Meanwhile, critiques that fans made about how Katniss in the books is somewhat coded as a person of color were essentially overlooked.) Once again, the series had already anticipated this: The media’s dismissal of Lawrence’s abilities based on superficial reasons directly played into how effective she was in the role, exactly like Katniss herself.

Honestly, despite how frequently The Hunger Games fumbled its plot points in execution, Collins’s deep meta-awareness of society as a high-concept production, and the way she built those reminders into the books — literally from the ground up; remember the hidden cameras buried in the ground all around the arena? — meant that once the machine of filmmaking got underway, all those elements just kept paying dividends.

Constance: Jennifer Lawrence’s casting, for me, epitomizes both the best and the worst of the movie adaptations, and the way they smoothed out so much of what was spiky and unpleasant in the books. Unlike Aja and Emily, I’m more a book partisan than a movie partisan for this franchise — with the exception of Catching Fire, which I agree is a terrific movie and a so-so book — but Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss is both everything I love about the movies and everything I wish they had done differently.

Book Katniss is very pointedly a child. She’s starving to death, she’s potentially a person of color (there’s a popular fan theory that she’s meant to be read as a person of Native descent), and after she’s caught in an explosion in the first Hunger Games, she becomes hard of hearing.

Movie Katniss is a beautiful, glowing young woman who is the picture of health, and who is emphatically white. (Notably, the studio refused to consider any nonwhite actresses when casting Katniss.) The things that make Katniss especially vulnerable in the books — her childishness, her lack of nourishment, her nonwhiteness, her disability — just don’t exist in the movies. That makes it harder to be grossed out when you see her in the arena, because you don’t really feel that she’s a child, or that the arena is permanently and physically changing her, or that she’s at the mercy of a bunch of well-nourished rich white kids.

And in general, these movies tend to shy away from any exploration of power that is more nuanced than “some people have a lot of money and other people don’t.” They take a certain pleasure in spectacle, and they’re never quite able to distance themselves from that pleasure so that the audience can interrogate it, the way Collins distances her readers from the spectacle in the books.

The movies are just never willing to let Panem feel as gross as it feels in the books. They want us to enjoy watching Katniss be beautiful and badass without feeling like we are exploiting her, and they want us to experience Panem’s horror on an individual level (it is mean to these particular people, and that is bad because we like them) rather than on a systemic level (it is a system designed to withhold power from these particular groups of people, which makes it much like our own).

But having said all that: Jennifer Lawrence is absolutely extraordinary as Katniss. She’s able to be callous and withholding to everyone around her and also completely vulnerable to the camera, so that we always understand exactly how damaged Katniss is and why, and we also see why the people around her might not. The choices she makes as an actress do a lot of work pushing back against the movies’ tendency to make Katniss into a blank-faced action hero (“Please remember that after Katniss shoots a bow and kills someone, her face cannot be badass,” she told director Gary Ross when she was in auditions), and she has the kind of unforced charisma that makes it easy to understand why Katniss is such a valuable propaganda tool.

These movies might focus more on individual trauma than on systemic oppression, but Lawrence’s performance is so grounded and so emotionally authentic that Katniss’s trauma is always present and incredibly visceral.

Alex: I don’t think we can talk about casting without talking about the man I like to call “Potato Finnick.” Like she did with Katniss, Collins does a great job of describing the main characters (aside from Primrose, whom I literally cannot remember anything about) in a way that not only sticks in your head but also lets your imagination work. With Finnick, I was picturing vintage Jude Law or a young Ryan Gosling or Jesse Williams as the charismatic fisher prince from District 4.

But alas, we got none of those. Yes, I understand some of those dream castings are impossible without a time machine, but I was hoping we’d get someone memorable enough to rival those images in my head.

And instead we got … well … can you name the actor who plays Finnick (without Googling)?

How well did the casting department do when it comes to the rest of the characters? I cannot be the only one who is still holding out hope for a spinoff for Jena Malone’s Johanna Mason. I refuse to believe it.

Emily: Excuse me, Alex, but I absolutely remember the name of Sam Claflin. Now, that’s almost certainly just because I have stupidly trained my brain to remember the names of actors, and not because I’ve just loved him in his post-Hunger Games roles, like “the guy in that one romantic movie also starring Emilia Clarke.” But I do remember his name! (I’m also not really the person to consult on this, but I think he’s a very handsome fella.)

I go back and forth on the movies. The first is a wonderful announcement of a star arriving onscreen (to think that I initially thought Emily Browning should star! Please absolve me of my sins!), but Ross is a clunky action director, and he never finds a way to capture the over-the-top lavishness of what the Capitol is supposed to represent.

The second is the one where everything clicks. Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer) is a stronger action director; the ways the story critiques existing power structures fits more easily into typical Hollywood storytelling tropes; and Jennifer Lawrence gives one of her best performances (arguably better than the one in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook that won her an Oscar). Plus, the last 20 minutes or so create this headlong rush toward whatever the next movie is going to be, a sense that the world is coming apart at the seams and real change is possible.

The problem, of course, is that Collins’s cynicism — in which all new bosses become the old boss, because the channels that power has carved in our society are so very deep and hard to fill in — is precisely the wrong kind of cynicism to try to depict in a Hollywood film.

Both Mockingjay movies are … fine, but their attempts to adapt the book mostly straightforwardly reveal how the movies never quite found a way to build a larger political philosophy of their own universe. That was fine in the first two films, where Katniss is only slowly getting her education, but the last two films need to be about Katniss realizing how little will actually change due to her actions. She gets to be alive. That’s about it.

It’s not that Hollywood movies, and even Hollywood blockbusters, can’t handle a darkly cynical tone. But it’s much harder to tell cynical, big-budget stories that are, in essence, about how this sort of storytelling creates easily digestible tales of heroes and villains that ignore how the rich and powerful will always be rich and powerful, and if you somehow join them, your interests will suddenly shift, unless you are an incredibly strong-willed person. And even then …

Hollywood struggles to tell stories like this because Hollywood hates to think about being part of the problem. The Hunger Games worked as a storytelling skeleton when its haves and have-nots were abstract depictions of some other world’s problems. But, paradoxically, the closer the series got to depicting problems in our world, the more Hollywood seemed afraid of implicating itself.

Constance: While we’re dealing with casting, I think one of the issues that really hobbled the movies is that none of the young male cast is anywhere near Lawrence’s level. I think that’s one of the reasons the love triangle tends to get dismissed as silly YA nonsense: No offense to Liam Hemsworth as Gale or Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, but neither of them is at Jennifer Lawrence’s level of charisma. So whenever you see her onscreen with one of them, it’s like you’re watching a lioness casually swat around a field mouse. There’s just no comparison.

But I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the love triangle, in part because it was my way into the franchise to begin with, and in part because I think it’s actually a really effective tool for character exploration. Whatever boy Katniss is leaning toward at a given moment tells us an enormous amount about what she thinks of herself at any given time, and her complete inability to express what she feels to either one of them is one of her more heartbreaking traits.

In particular, I’ve always appreciated that Peeta, whose primary characteristics all code as feminine, gets to be the romantic male lead in this grim and gritty action franchise: He’s the empathetic one who is a good communicator and a good cook and an artist, basically. Those are all valuable traits that this franchise respects, and they are all absolutely what would normally be assigned to “the girlfriend” in a male-led franchise.

Or maybe I just identify with Peeta because I too love bread and I too would die for Katniss. Either way.

What about you: Team Peeta or Team Gale? Or (dark horse) Team Johanna? (Gotta agree with Alex, I would absolutely watch a Johanna spinoff.)

Alex: Gale blew up Katniss’s sister. How could anyone be Team Gale? Peeta may be a little needy, and his main survival skill is painting himself as a rock, but Gale is a fuckboy. Gale made Katniss’s life more difficult with each action he took.

Like, could you imagine being Katniss and outlasting all your fellow teenage murderers, getting stung by mutated bees, watching your childhood friend die, and then having to deal with Gale claiming you’re not spending enough time with him and that his feelings are hurt?

Thank u, next.

And then when you go back into the Hunger Games, he’s out there acting foolish and decides he wants to be the man? And because he’s a fantastic idiot, he bombs your little sister, a.k.a. the entire reason you’re in the Games?

To be honest, I’m not into Peeta and Katniss that much either, but the idea of those two being together is still better than Katniss being with Gale. Even if the real relationship should have been Peeta and Finnick forever.

Eleanor: Eh, this is another reminder why I didn’t love this series: The love triangle did not do it for me at all. Constance, I read your explanation of how it’s a great tool for character explanation, and I get it on an intellectual level. But on a heart level, I just don’t care! Love triangles are like jokes: If you have to explain them, something went wrong.

So I am neither Team Peeta nor Team Gale. I don’t care about either of them. Team Katniss. Team “don’t do a love triangle unless you’re really going to commit to it.”

Emily: I guess if forced to decide, I am Team Peeta because I like that Katniss goes for someone who can maybe sort of begin to understand her trauma, rather than someone more exciting. But in both the books and movies, I always liked that idea more in theory than execution.

I get what everybody involved was going for, but also, I’m the kind of sadist who enjoys how badly Collins tries to make Team Gale fans feel bad about their life choices throughout the end of Mockingjay. “Yes!” I laugh, from atop my tower of mild Peeta affection. “Suffer for your decisions!”

But, really, what I wanted was for Haymitch and/or Effie to find love. Maybe together? Why not!

Aja: Okay, okay, I stand ready to be mock(ingjay)ed for all my life choices, but hear me out. You know all the things that Constance very rightly points out above about how Collins uses the love triangle to posit two different versions of who Katniss could be? That kind of thematic complexity is usually what I live for and appreciate most about good romances, and especially well-done love triangles. But here, it doesn’t work for me at all. And not just because I actually thought Gale was a pretty good romantic foil for Katniss for most of the series (sue me), but because I also thought, for most of the series, that his philosophical role in the rebellion was also a pretty good foil for Collins’s political machinations.

I felt then and still feel now that Gale made some pretty valid points about the need for radical systemic disruption coming from outside the system, and seeing the ham-fisted way Collins not only exploded the ship (sorry) but made Gale himself the bearer of a needlessly ironic, overly Shakespearean moral about how violent protest is an inherently immoral slippery slope and “both sides made some bad points” was so deeply infuriating to me.

Like many people, in my case perhaps because I grew up around guns and soldiers, I honestly didn’t realize that I was apparently supposed to be growing more and more wary of Gale’s militant radicalization until the climax. But I was also reading The Hunger Games alongside Derrick Jensen’s critiques of the way violence is used as a socioeconomic tool. Jensen’s observation that “violence done by those lower on the [social] hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims” made a really strong impression on me, including shoring up my skepticism of the moralization happening in the last book.

To me, although Collins’s use of the love triangle as an expression of her moral philosophies was an important literary tool that I respect, and although I especially appreciate what she did in terms of subverting gender norms with Peeta, I think it ultimately failed completely.

Collins ultimately took a high-handed approach to themes that she had built up with far greater complexity until that point — themes like the difficulty of resisting an oppressive system without resorting to the tactics of the oppressor, and the way the socioeconomic consequences of that resistance so often fall upon the most vulnerable members of society. But then it turned out that she’d built up all those themes partly in order to paint radical resistance in the absolute worst light possible — and she mapped each of her ships onto the “right” and the “wrong” side of that facile political discourse. No matter what you think of Gale, he deserved better.

Am I suggesting The Hunger Games itself should have been more radical? Not exactly, but I think everyone who was struggling then and now to #resist in an increasingly violent political age also deserved a more nuanced, or at least less condescending, take on the use of violence as a tool for social change. Maybe not full-on Braveheart, but at least a little more The Purge.